Hello everyone. I am new to this site and pretty new to learning beyond microsoft basics. Started learning Perl as my first language and I'm going through and old copy of CompTIA A+ (2009) learning the basics. I want to get into the security aspects but I'm on a limited income so I'm teaching myself. Still learning where I can go to get training without signing away my first born so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I really like learning hands on but I'm afraid of damaging my one and only computer and I would be really devastated if that happened. If you could ways I can prevent that I from happening would also be greatly appreciated.

I really like learning hands on but I'm afraid of damaging my one and only computer and I would be really devastated if that happened. If you could ways I can prevent that I from happening would also be greatly appreciated.

You can always run a testing/development environment in a virtual machine. My personal choice is VirtualBox:

Found your site in my usual wanderings and a big tip o' the hat to you all. Seems like a great community...

Let's see a bit about ole cap'n... Been in the IT field most my life(mostly as your break/fix tech. or lowly help desk 1 or 2) but I've managed to wet my beak in some interesting fields doing so as well(live & on-demand media streaming, POS systems).

My C++ skills are rusty at best at this point but I'm pretty up to date on modern web languages: HTML/PHP/XML etc. and could probably work on my jQuery/Javascript skills.

You can take a wild guess which Linux distro I'm using though I've tried and used all the majors and am now happily in the specialty aisle. Anyways that seems sufficient for now wouldn't you say?

I started in the days of dial-in BBS with a minor miracles ws2000 modem and a real, physical VT100 terminal. Fast-forward a couple of decades and I'm still using a dumb terminal although these days it's called Windows. I keep linux in it's place in a VM.

Some interesting activity I noted in wireshark on my PC peaked my interest again, so here I am.

hi, so im just now looking into all of this for the first time and it seems a bit overwhelming with all the information out there, it seems that there is a life times worth to learn and im trying to figure out where to even start. i mean i have a basic walmart grade laptop and basic computer common knowledge but how to i take the first step, or even how do i figure out where that step is??